DIEP - Data Integration and Exchange Platform

The Data Integration and Exchange Platform (DIEP) project addresses Challenge 2 of the Future Cities Solutions Competition. The project is a feasibility study to examine the potential for creating a city management platform capable of ingesting a wide range of disparate Local Authority data and to provide new and innovative ways in which to visualise and analyse the data. The project is a collaboration between AIMES Grid Services Ltd, an award winning cloud infrastructure provider based in Liverpool and experienced in creating large-scale publically funded demonstrator facilities and the IT Innovation Centre, a world class applied research centre part of the University of Southampton and experienced in deploying a wide range of advanced information technologies in industry and commerce.

AIMES has created a government accredited G-Cloud facility at its cloud computing campus at Liverpool Innovation Park specifically to promote the development of innovative platforms for securely and scaleably ingesting data and for deploying applications which lead to sustainable services. IT Innovations have undertaken a substantial a number of UK and EU funded projects which have led to the development of new software platforms including the DESURBS – Designing Safer Urban Spaces – platform which assists urban stakeholders including planners, engineers and architects manage urban data. The DIEP project will combine the AIMES infrastructure with the IT Innovation Centre's software platform to create a new service for Local Authorities. The first phase of the project will create a proof-of-concept prototype to illustrate the feasibility of ingesting a range of disparate city datasets and providing new services to visualise the data using mapping technologies and to analyse the data to create new insights. The DIEP platform will use open API's to import the data and create a marketplace which will allow the UK Open Data community to innovate new apps and services for Local Authorities. The second phase of the DIEP project will establish a large-scale Future Cities management platform using the Open Source technologies and secure, resilient and scaleable G-Cloud infrastructure evaluated during the feasibility study.

The DIEP platform will provide new ways of visualising City data using a range of innovative mapping tools including a "slippy map" architecture and will evaluate a number of analytics services including comparative dashboards and statististical modelling. The DIEP project will enable Local Authorities to gain new insights from their data assets and to improve City decision and policy making.